The Santa Claus plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
10° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 14° in 1986.
Santa Claus’s center stands about 490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 630 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Coal Knobs, about 710 ft, 15 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Raccoon Creek Group (shale, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 24 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Santa Claus reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crooked Creek, Big Slough, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,230 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Santa Claus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Santa Claus has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Santa Claus normally reaches 55° and falls to 37°. The record high is 80°, in 1955; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 3.62 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 at Tell City, 14 miles south-southeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
